sleeping beauty in the golden purple sea

AT THE EDGE of the park was a hole and above this hole was always a cloud spectrum of vibrant curing colours. This hole looked like a big rabbit hole but it was not a rabbit hole. Everyone thought it was a rabbit hole but you see, Sam knew all about the rabbit hole secret. It was not for rabbits. “Listen carefully,” he whispered to me, “for I can only tell this story about the mystery of the sea to you once.” So, I listened carefully. In fact, I grew into an excellent and eloquent listener because of my great gentle friend and storyteller, Sam. The angel of the park.

“Underneath this secret hole dwell the powers of the purple and golden waters,” Sam told me with an urgent violet look in his eyes. Sam was always wearing something blue and something purple. I learned from him that a colour has an essence and a vibration and that purple has the highest vibration in the visible spectrum. But back to the sea story of Sam. “The purple waters lead to the golden sea where one will find the deepest part of the earth’s ocean, the place of the powers,” he said. He also explained that this was surprising because the deepest part of the world’s ocean had been charted as the Challenger Deep located in the western Pacific Ocean with measurements placed at 11.03 kilometers. “But you see, my dear Elizabeth, nobody knows that there is a seafloor with a greater depth than the Challenger Deep: the Golden Deep, my dear, the Golden Deep,” he repeated. “The deepest portion of the Golden Deep has been placed at 30.03 kilometers. But nobody knows. These waters are uncharted!”

Sam told me that the powers in these waters were extraordinary and that they were only known to those who lived inside the waters and to a very special select few who lived outside of them. “Who live inside these waters, Sam?” I asked as I clung to him imploringly. “Oh, very extraordinary spirit people, Elizabeth. The lights of love live inside these magical waters,” said he.

The lights of love! Oh, my big full eyes beaming now with curiosity. “I will reveal it to you, my dear Elizabeth, the lights of love who live inside the waters do not come from ordinary spheres of reality but from higher ones. They have special powers that extend beyond themselves and rise into the spirits of others because the depth of their love comes from this other vibrant higher water world.”

From that day forward Sam anointed my life with some of the greatest love stories known to earth: Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Orpheus and Eurydice, Paris and Helena, Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abelard and so many more. Fiction or non-fiction, it did not matter, to him the spirit of unending love could be found in all rivers that run to the same sea. And all these great lovers even after death were still living as light colours inside the Golden Deep.

II

SAM also explained that I could access the powers of the waters when I would be older and all grown up. “There will come a time when you will have a need to rekindle your childhood dreams, like you would need to rekindle an inner fire,” he told me. But I was only seven years old so I did not fully understand what he meant by ‘a need.’ I had no need to rekindle my dreams then, I was always dreaming, dreaming with my eyes open and dreaming with my eyes closed. Dreams were my higher reality, my golden appearance. “But someday you might not dream. Someday you will live in ordinary spheres of reality and no longer in the higher spheres and that might cause you to suffer and make your eyes loose their shine. You will be you but you might wish you were not. You must come then to these waters,” said he.

“You must sit here by this rabbit hole for three hours but only in the spring. After three hours, the waters will wake and out of this space will rise a force so vibrant so bright that all the cells in your body will illuminate with light. And then you will never be the same again.” “Why, what will happen to me?” I asked hesitantly yet urgently. “The law of nature will touch you. You will change! Your need will change into the face of love that will make you weep with love, and then Elizabeth, you will acquire a new visual perception of life and of love. Your spirit will be filled with a vibrant spectrum of curing colours and you will perceive your life in entirely new ways! And this extra power, which was waiting all your life in life after life for a chance to live will rise and shine.”

III

AFTER 30 years, I went back to visit the rabbit hole with my daughter who is now seven years old. We found it underneath a bunch of branches and leaves. It was the very spot where Sam’s body was found when he died from his drinking problem during the same spring when he gave me the knowledge of the great golden waters. As I was reaching for the rabbit hole, I was deeply reminded how Sam loved me like his own daughter whom he never saw after he started living in the park as an alcoholic. It was my own daughter who said that day that I had an obligation to write down this story in the hope that Sam’s daughter will read it and see the face of love in the face of her father. “And perhaps, mommy,” my daughter said, “she is in need of the purple powers because she is suffering, and her eyes have lost their colours and their shine.”

I am older now and all grown up and it is clear to me now why Sam graced me with this colourful story. He talked a great deal about colours. In fact, he was a colour philosopher who believed that the interplay of true, deep, and unending love was the interplay not of two halves of a whole but an interplay of great spectrums of lights. When he spoke of the lights of love he spoke of the nature and interplay of colours. He explained that if people could truly wake up to their own innate vibrant colour system and embrace both the light and the darkness fearlessly within, then they could acquire a new depth of knowledge, a golden knowledge, of the nature of love in the physical world.

When the all becomes too daunting and too much, I close my eyes now and become a sleeping beauty in the last sunset that fades. My essence falls into the purple powers of the golden sea and I enter into a fifth season where I dream dreams that make me forget I am dreaming, just like when I was a child. These vibrant curing colours, they turn towards me as Sam said, and they spray me with eternal love, unending love, and with spring.

Sam is in a beautiful place, I know this now, he is freedom creating powerful colour spectrums inside the most magical of all golden seas.

Oh Joan, thank you so for finding my story and sharing your words. This is such a great gift to my spirit and heart. I wept when I read about Stephen. Thank you from my depths for passing on this moment of vision to his children!

So many memorable phrases to cherish in this: “Sam told me with an urgent violet look in his eyes,” “the Golden Deep, my dear, the Golden Deep,” “the spirit of unending love could be found in all rivers that run to the same sea,” “waiting all your life in life after life for a chance to live,” “I enter into a fifth season where I dream dreams.” And there are more.

It is such a gift of respect for this one life to envision these unseen inner worlds. Who knows what mythic place any of us inhabit? It is also a spiritual realm, traversing boundaries of circumstance and appearance.

In the story and your ecstatic image, I find echoes, not only of Alice, but also of Peter Pan, with Elizabeth meeting Sam in her childhood and then returning to the garden with her own daughter, a generation later.

What Sam explained–“if people could truly wake up to their own innate vibrant colour system and embrace both the light and the darkness fearlessly within, then they could acquire a new depth of knowledge, a golden knowledge, of the nature of love in the physical world”–seems to me to encapsulate rather exactly the spirit of your art, of what you aim for and achieve with it. And as a viewer of your work, I so often feel “anointed,” opened up to new meanings in color, and a new freedom to experience light and darkness alike as the “curing colours” of love.

And I will be walking back to these wonderful words of yours, Lucy, so I can remember to live in gratitude of this ‘gift of respect for this one life.’ How beautiful and true this expression:

“It is such a gift of respect for this one life to envision these unseen inner worlds. Who knows what mythic place any of us inhabit? It is also a spiritual realm, traversing boundaries of circumstance and appearance.”

Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, how marvelous of you to link them to my story. They filled my childhood imagination with abundant colours, happiness, and joy! I too feel so “anointed” by all the knowledge you open up in me time after time. I would like to share with you these words of Helen Keller who believed that ‘everything has its wonders’ and whose deep inner world was composed of the curing colours of silence, darkness, love, vision, and light!

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.” Helen Keller